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Neil Diamond To Headline 2018 Mission Estate Concert!
Wednesday, 25 October 2017, 8:37 am Press Release: Mission Estate Winery
The Mission Estate Concert announces that musical icon, Grammy Award® winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member, Neil Diamond, will perform at the 2018 concert on Saturday, 17 March 2018.
The Mission Concert is part of Neil Diamond’s world tour celebrating his incomparable 50-year career and hits spanning decades such as Cherry Cherry, Holly Holy, Cracklin’ Rosie, Song Sung Blue, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Solitary Man, Sweet Caroline, Love on the Rocks, Desiree and Shilo.
The Exclusive Mission Concert Club Box Office opens at 9am Friday 27 October www.missionconcert.co.nz. If you are not a member or have changed your email address since the last concert, simply go to www.missionconcert.co.nz and update your details. Registration is free and members will be kept posted with all the latest event news.
For Concert Club members who will not have direct internet access on Friday morning you will receive, via email, a special code that can be used to purchase tickets at any Ticketek Outlet also from 9am Friday 27 October.
All remaining tickets will be available to the general public at 9am on Saturday, 28 October via Ticketek and the Mission Concert website.
More: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1710/S00434/neil-diamond-to-headline-2018-mission-estate-concert.htm

Neil Diamond grosses $1.2M from concert at Philips Arena in Atlanta
Thousands of Neil Diamond lovers in Atlanta must have wanted to tell the singer/songwriter "Hello Again" during his most recent show in the Peach State.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee performed at Philips Arena in Atlanta April 30 in front of 12,235 fans (13,197 tickets were allotted). The show, which was promoted by Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Live Nation Entertainment Inc. (NYSE: LYV), had $1,207,288 in gross sales, according to data recently compiled by Billboard.
More here: http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2017/05/09/neil-diamond-grosses-1-2m-from-concert-at-philips.html

On his golden anniversary tour, Neil Diamond still shines
Call it a golden anniversary for a diamond. Neil Diamond, that is, who is celebrating 50 years as a hit recording artist with a world tour that stopped Wednesday at Scottrade Center.
Musing on the five decades gone by, Diamond told the crowd, “I was 7 years old when I started.”
He was joking, but he wasn’t off by much. Diamond, 76, started writing songs as a teenager and by the mid-‘60s was working in the famed Brill Building, cranking out tunes for various pop stars of the day. “Solitary Man,” his debut single as a recording artist in his own right, was released in 1966.
Diamond’s two-hour Scottrade show was packed with hits and was deeply nostalgic for fans and the artist as well. He talked and sang about his Brooklyn beginnings, recalling his home turf’s tough neighborhoods in “Jungletime” and showed old home movies (on a diamond-shaped video screen, no less) during “Brooklyn Roads.”
The hits were the concert’s main draw, of course, and Diamond delivered them in bunches, starting off with “Cherry Cherry” and moving quickly into slower, romantic fare including “September Morn” and “Longfellow Serenade.”
Introducing “Play Me,” he said: “It’s not easy for a man to come up here and make himself vulnerable. We’re supposed to be tough and able to handle it all — doing everything that’s demanded of a man, except being vulnerable in front of 12,614 people.”
If Diamond felt at all exposed — which seems unlikely — the crowd backed him up by singing along with the song’s chorus.
There were plenty of other opportunities to sing along, among them “Song Sung Blue,” “I’m a Believer” (initially a hit for the Monkees and revived decades later for the “Shrek” soundtrack) and “Forever in Blue Jeans.”
Diamond was backed by two singers and an 11-piece band that was rock-solid and unobtrusive, though the players knew when to shine, such as Larry Klimas’ saxophone solo, which stood in for Barbra Streisand’s vocal on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Diamond moved slowly and somewhat stiffly as he played to all sides of the stage, but his voice was strong — low and gravelly when he spoke/sang some lyrics but soaring when it needed to.
The set included a moody, brooding take on “Solitary Man,” an upbeat, rhythm-heavy “Sooliamon,” and a medley from “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” Diamond closed with a handful of songs he noted had appeared on his epochal live album “Hot August Night”: “Done Too Soon” (its relentless recitation of historical figures’ names an obvious precursor — and better alternative — to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”), “Holly Holy” and “I Am … I Said.”
The four-song encore kept the crowd on its feet with the requisite singalong “Sweet Caroline,” plus “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “America” and a revival-tent-raising “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” which included a plea for everyone — “black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, great and small/We are God’s children all,” Diamond preached — sending the crowd back into the street with both a message of inclusiveness and no shortage of familiar tunes running through their heads.
Set list
“Cherry, Cherry”
“You Got to Me”
“September Morn”
“Longfellow Serenade”
“Love on the Rocks”
“Play Me”
“Beautiful Noise”
“Jungletime”
“If You Know What I Mean”
“Song Sung Blue”
“Forever in Blue Jeans”
“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”
“Solitary Man”
“I’m a Believer”
“Brooklyn Roads”
“Pretty Amazing Grace”
“Be”/“Lonely Looking Sky”/“Skybird”
“Jazz Time”
“Soolaimon”
“Done Too Soon”
“Holly Holy”
“I Am … I Said”
Encore
“Sweet Caroline”
“Cracklin’ Rosie”
“America”
“Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show”
Link: http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/music/reviews/on-his-golden-anniversary-tour-neil-diamond-still-shines/article_ad73552d-5bd7-5c1f-a3ba-de9df672c457.html
There are great photos at the link as well.

Neil Diamond Talks 50th Anniversary Tour, New Christmas LP
It's been a weird couple of days for Neil Diamond. Two nights before speaking with Rolling Stone, he teamed up with Jimmy Fallon to take on Natalie Portman and J.J. Abrams in a game of Password, but got completely crushed in a clip already viewed more than a million times. (Diamond didn't help his team much when Fallon's hints of "mamba" and "guacamole" elicited a response of "salad" and not the correct answer of "salsa.") Then the following night he performed a medley of Christmas songs from his new LP Acoustic Christmas in pelting rain during Rockefeller Center's Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. "It was a little pandemonious and slippery," he says. "I had fun once I got onstage and stopped worrying about falling off the stage."
Right now, Diamond is warm, dry and ready to eat some lunch in the lobby restaurant of a luxury hotel on the Upper East Side. It's the sort of place that offers a three-course prix-fixe menu for $48, but Diamond can't find a single thing he wants and asks for the bar menu, ultimately just telling his wife/manager Katie McNeil, seated a nearby table, to just pick something she thinks he'll like. She goes with chicken noodle soup and a Caesar salad, but once it comes he notices the salad has anchovies, which he meticulously picks out one-by-one and places on a side plate during our interview.
There's a lot to talk about. Not only is Acoustic Christmas the fourth Christmas album for a singer known as the "Jewish Elvis," but the 75-year-old just announced dates for a massive 50th anniversary tour in 2017. Diamond spoke with RS about what fans can expect from the tour, what compels him to spend so much time on the road at this point in his life, and his memories of performing at the Last Waltz, which took place just over 40 years ago.
More: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/neil-diamond-talks-50th-anniversary-tour-new-christmas-lp-w453713
I'm only posting the 1st three paragraphs. I'd love to know what some of you think of the some of the possible set list songs. One song in particular thrills me, and would be worth the price of admission to see him sing it.

Neil Diamond credits his wife Katie with inspiring him to finish a new song five years in the making
October 17, 2015 7:00am
Kathy McCabeNational Music Writer
IT took five years for Neil Diamond to write his latest fan favourite The Art Of Love.
The simple acoustic ballad has struck a resounding chord with an audience already passionately in love with more than 50 songs from the vast catalogue of his five decade career.
The 74-year-old music legend wouldn’t give up on the song because he had found love again, with manager Katie McNeil who he married in 2012.
He has tinkered with the song over the years, rewriting it and recording it with producer guru Rick Rubin and finishing it with the equally revered studio heavyweights Don Was and Jacknife Lee.
... snip
After being opened up to psychoanalysis by comedian Lenny Bruce, he spent four months writing the 1971 hit I Am ... I Said after his experiences with therapy.
When asked if he has favourite composition, he defers to nominate his first Grammy winner as “my best song”, released a few months after he turned 30.
“I remember the amount of time and work and love I put into it and I wrote it 45 years ago,” he says.
“I am ... I Said started with the premise I was going to tell everybody who I am. I was too young, too superficial and my mind was into other things.
Much more here: http://www.couriermail.com.au/entertainment/neil-diamond-credits-his-wife-katie-with-inspiring-him-to-finish-a-new-song-five-years-in-the-making/story-fnic6ynx-1227571389965
It was great to see and hear our Neil in the video.

Veteran crooner's folksy stridency and wattled, lounge-lizard charisma carries the audience along, writes Ed Power
By Ed Power
11:40PM BST 30 Jun 2015
Neil Diamond is not wildly revered in the fashion of contemporaries such as Burt Bacharach or Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. However, he has never exactly been uncool either – one of the reasons super-producer Rick Rubin failed at his mission to rehabilitate Diamond with 2005's stripped-down 12 Songs album was that the crooner's reputation didn't require rescuing in the first place.
Instead, the composer of several of the late 20th century's enduring soft pop anthems exists in curious isolation – beloved by his considerable fan base but otherwise a marginal presence, an icon who casts an oddly diminished shadow. He continues to tour and record yet already feels like a figure out of history.
That's despite an often formidable catalogue, which he negotiated at a breezy canter on the opening date of a new UK tour. Witnessing the throaty, crowd-pleasing Red Red Wine and Beautiful Noise reprised by Diamond's rambunctious backing band, it seemed remarkable the 74-year-old's stock is not higher – even a tune as superficially throwaway as I'm A Believer, originally a hit for The Monkees, was revealed to be an ingenious marriage of the upbeat and the autumnal.
Dressed like Austin Powers's groovy grandfather, the sequins on his tight-fit trousers glimmering under the spotlight, Diamond furthermore defied the unofficial rule that veteran performers must turn grumpier with age (see Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young etc). As the set teetered during a mid-period drift into lesser known numbers, he remained endlessly smiley and animated - wattled, lounge-lizard charisma carrying the audience along.
That slouching charm also obscured the cracks and warps in a voice that, after six decades in the business, is no longer the burnished instrument it once was. Then, Diamond was never adored because of his technical virtuosity or his dad dancing (a tradition he was championing before the concept was even recognised). His appeal was always grounded in the dash of his songwriting which, without ever tipping towards melodrama or portentousness, runs the gamut of human experience.
Indeed, there are arguably vestiges of greatness in his repertoire. Have another three and a half minutes of pop articulated the perspective of the underdog as searingly as I Am… I Said? Who else could tenderly address a teenage girl's growing pains – as Diamond does on Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon – without coming off an inveterate creep?
He finished with I've Been This Way Before, a Sinatra-esque power-ballad from 1974. A cheesy troubadour warbling about life's cruelties and contradictions sounds like a fast-pass to middle-of-the-road purgatory. But Diamond's faith in the material was unbending and his folksy stridency short-circuited the listener's cynicism. Suddenly you were a true believer too.
Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/live-music-reviews/11706980/Neil-Diamond-Odyssey-Arena-Belfast-review-Vestiges-of-greatness-in-his-repertoire.html
I hate it when writers add snark to try to be cool or whatever their reason. -Melissa